White Dog Fell from the Sky - By Eleanor Morse Page 0,98

feet he wasn’t a double agent.

She turned the truck around, sick at heart, and drove back to her office. Her boss was on the phone when she went to find him. He indicated a chair. A picture of his three children and his wife, Susan, smiled from a bookcase on one wall. Susan was grinning bravely, but underneath the smile was something else. Alice had been to their house a couple of times, a tidy, well-run home, bursting with kid energy, barely contained. Susan had the look of a woman whose life was permanently on hold. Alice imagined her catching up with herself around sixty, when there’d be hell to pay. And C.T., a kindly, nonassertive man, a little over his head in every sphere, would hardly be equal to it.

He got off the phone and greeted Alice warmly. “Haven’t seen much of you since you returned. Are you better now?”

“Yes, thanks for asking.”

“Tick bite fever’s no joke.”

“No. But I’m sorry I was a few days late with the position paper.”

“It couldn’t be helped.” However, his eyes said it could have been helped if she hadn’t gotten it into her head to run off with that fellow who was still married. “I’ve got a few changes to suggest,” he said. He dug around in a tower of documents and handed the paper to her. “But you’ve done an excellent job. Just those few corrections and we’ll ship it off to the permanent secretary and minister.” Coming from him, this was high praise.

“C.T., I’m afraid I’ve got to go home.”

“You’re not well?”

“My gardener has been apprehended and deported to South Africa. The chief of police seemed to think he was a double agent.”

“And is he?”

“Definitely not.”

“I’m sorry to hear it. But at this point I’m afraid there’s not much to be done.”

Anger throbbed behind her eyes. A wildness overtook her. “If this were Susan, would you say there was nothing to be done?”

“No.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to attack you.”

“I just want to caution you not to do anything you’ll regret.”

She thought of asking him to quit the avuncularity. It annoyed her that he seemed to have pegged her as a hotheaded nitwit. “I’m going to try to locate his family, that’s all. I think they need to know. I’ve got to go through his papers, see if I can find an address.”

“I understand.”

“I’ll have those changes done for you by tomorrow.”

“No worries.”

She greeted White Dog and patted her on the head. The bed in Isaac’s room was made in rumpled fashion. Under it, in a cardboard box, were a few clothes, most of which she’d passed on to him from Lawrence. At the bottom of the box were four letters, three in the same hand, one in a different hand, all from Pretoria. She opened one of the three. It was written in Setswana, but she recognized a few words, piecing together the news from his mother that Isaac had told her earlier: his brothers unable to attend school because they had no shoes. There was no return address on the envelope, but there was a post office box address inside, at the top of the letter. Alice opened a second letter, and the same address appeared inside. She jotted it down, replaced the letter in the envelope, and put both letters back at the bottom of the box under his clothes.

She wrote to his mother in English, expecting she’d be able to find a translator. In it, she explained what had happened and asked where Isaac was likely to have been taken. On her way back to work, she dropped the letter in a mailbox and prepared herself to wait a couple of weeks for a reply.

That evening, she drove to Naledi, the air so hot it knocked the breath out of her. Heat oozed from every blade of grass, from every parched, shriveled, hapless leaf. She parked and walked into a rabbit warren of paths. In front of a cardboard house, a young boy pushed a little wire car with tin can wheels. Goat droppings littered the way. She passed a man going the other way. She greeted him, and he stood long enough for her to ask directions to the house the South Africans had targeted.

“That way, mma.”

She thanked him and turned left at the tree he’d indicated, but almost immediately, there was a choice of paths, one leading beside a house made from a car chassis, the other to the right. She stopped and turned around